


Congratulations, Your Majesty

by valerie1972



Category: Dragon Age - All Media Types
Genre: Fluff, Gen, What-If
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-18
Updated: 2013-11-18
Packaged: 2018-01-01 23:57:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,747
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1050110
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/valerie1972/pseuds/valerie1972
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A new member of the royal family arrives.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Congratulations, Your Majesty

"Congratulations, Your Majesty," she said, tears pooling in her eyes as she handed the king the swaddled infant. "It’s a boy."

The king was finding it difficult to process anything more than the sight of the shocking miracle in his arms, so he settled for stating the obvious. “I have another son,” he whispered, to himself more than anyone else. He shook his head slowly as he stared transfixed at the bundle and a wide smile spread into his cheeks. “Maker’s balls, another son!”

The king was grinning like a mabari in a pasture full of rabbits as he took in each perfect detail of the tiny person he was holding. Well, the parts that weren’t hidden from view by the swaddling, at least. The king’s sight blurred and he looked back to the woman. “You… thank you. I don’t know whether to clap you in irons or kiss you until you can’t see straight, but thank you.”

He walked to the open doorway and stuck his head into the antechamber. Of course, there was one of the squires that seemed to sprout organically out of every nook in the castle so the king ordered, “Set the bells ringing! And I want a crier on the doorstep of every Chantry! Oh - and send riders to -” he seemed at a loss for a moment but finished cheerfully, “wherever we usually send riders!” When the squire stared at him blankly instead of moving toward the door, the king added, “Run, lad! Ferelden needs to know about its new prince!” The liveried teen seemed to finally recover from the shock of being directly addressed by the king and barely managed a salute before he ran off. 

The woman’s voice held a fair amount of affection and amusement mixed in with exasperation and concern as she addressed the king when he returned to her side. “How in the name of Andraste’s left shoe is he supposed to have a normal life when you announce his arrival with bells and criers?” She smiled and shook her head for a moment before adding with mock deference and a slight nod, “Your Majesty.”

"We’ll manage," he replied, a plan that was admittedly a little light on detail. But now was not the time for argument - it was the time for celebration! The king pressed a kiss to the woman’s temple as he stroked the golden fuzz that covered the baby’s head. He paused and looked into the woman’s eyes. “With you here, how could we do any less?"

“A bit difficult to raise a babe in Fort Drakon,” she observed, “So it’s to be kissing, then?”

The king’s eyes narrowed slightly and his voice curled around his reply. “Merciless kissing. To exhaustion, in fact.” He cupped her cheek with the hand not currently holding their son close against his chest. 

Closing her eyes against the almost painfully beautiful sight of the two of them, she smiled and allowed her head to relax against his palm. “Speaking of exhaustion, I have discovered that traveling from Ferelden to Weisshaupt and back while pregnant followed by giving birth to a baby is quite tiring even for a Grey Warden. I don’t know what I was thinking.”

The king sighed. “I”m not sure what you were thinking either. If you’d mentioned your condition in a letter you know I’d have -“

The woman was saved from the rest of the king’s admonition by a loud rapping on the door to the anteroom. “Let me intercept and ease them into it,” the king muttered, so certain that she would agree that he kissed her temple again and stepped away without really waiting for her nod. He closed the door between the woman and the antechamber to allow her what quiet he could. He paused and closed his eyes to inhale the sweet scent of his infant son and braced himself for the coming onslaught.

Two children poured in through the door when the king called for it to open.

While there was enough of her father’s look about the girl to forestall any gossip, she was her mother writ small in most of her physical appearance. She even styled her hair like her mother’s now that she was old enough to have an opinion - her mother argued that the style was too mature for a seven-year-old girl but the girl persisted. And when this particular girl persisted she usually got her way. The king suspected that the hairstyle was one small way for the girl to maintain a connection to her mother, whether the girl or her mother recognized it as such. The girl would rather have stayed at her mother’s side than remain in the capital but as the future Queen of Ferelden the girl was already learning that sometimes duty means not getting exactly what you want.

The boy was a mirror of his father even more than the girl was of her mother. The queen had joked that if she hadn’t borne him herself she might think she’d had no part in making him at all. It was an exaggeration, of course, for the boy had her eyes and a bit of her smile and even at the age of five his facial expressions were sometimes so reminiscent of his mother that the king’s heart ached.

As usual, the girl reached the king first and spoke without preamble. “That squire said there was a baby prince in here but that can’t be right because we already have one!” She punctuated this observation by pointing at the boy as he fidgeted beside her, trying to catch a glimpse of the bundle the king held so close. The boy was brought to attention a second later as his brain caught up with his hearing and yelped, “I am not a baby prince! I’m a grown-up boy prince!” He stood as straight as possible and, as if worried that was not grown-up enough, raised himself on tiptoe. 

The king attempted to forestall an argument that might very well come to blows by drawing their attention to the baby. “There is a baby prince here, but if you’re not very quiet you might wake him up or make him cry.”

The boy bumped the girl out of her position at the baby’s head so that he could get a better look at this baby prince. 

The girl huffed and rolled her eyes at the boy who was now studiously ignoring her in favor of inspecting his little brother, but she wasn’t letting this rudeness pass without comment. “Just because you’re a prince doesn’t mean you can shove people without begging their pardon.”

The boy tore his eyes from the baby just long enough to stick his tongue out at the girl. “Well, just because you’re a princess doesn’t mean you’re the boss of me!”

Correcting the boy on the girl’s title seemed likely to start another argument, so if the girl was going to let it go the king would follow her example. Perhaps she hadn’t noticed; it was unlike her not to leap at a chance to correct the boy.

She stuck her tongue right back at the boy. Upon realizing that the king was watching her, she straightened her posture and peered into the bundle in the king’s arms. She looked quite thoughtful and said, “He doesn’t look like much of a prince, does he?”

A man had slipped into the room behind the children, but the king had been satisfied to ignore him until he spoke. When he did, he said what might have been the worst possible thing to say to the king at that moment: “How wonderful! Another Theirin to secure the succession!” That he looked for all the world as if the baby’s very existence was due to his own particularly clever plan only irritated the king further.

“He’s a person, you know, not a spare boot lace,” the king said through a carefully neutral expression. Anyone observing from across the room might think the king commented on the weather. Anyone, perhaps, but the baby’s mother, who would have recognized the king’s tone as barely-controlled fury. “You will excuse us.”

The man sighed heavily and left the room with what he probably thought was a fair amount of dignity.

Then the moment had passed and the normally avuncular king turned back toward the children with a wide smile. He looked back down at the infant sleeping peacefully in his arms and said in a tone targeted for his young audience, “With the way some people go on about Theirin blood we should stick some in a jar and let it run the place, shouldn’t we?” His grin grew broader and charmingly silly when he knelt to the height of the children and continued in a conspirational whisper, “Yes! That’s the plan! Stick a jar of my blood on the throne and we all run away to live in… in…” he stumbled trying to come up with a suitably silly destination when the boy, surprisingly, said, “Highever!” And so the king concluded his plan with, “And pretend to be Couslands for all of our days.”

The girl, sometimes far too bright and pragmatic to get pulled along with the king’s flights of fancy, piped up. “But then we’d have to be teyrns and teyrnas and that’s almost like being kings and queens so we should probably just stay here where all of our things are.” She met the king’s eyes and, apparently satisfied that he wasn’t going to contradict her, went back to examining the baby. “He’s very pink, isn’t he?”

The boy looked up at the king after a few moments and asked, “What’s his name?”

With a start, the king realized that he had no idea what the baby’s name was and that the subject hadn’t even come up. He stood back to his full height and placed his free hand on the boy’s shoulder. “Let’s go find out!”

He led the children through the doorway to the other room and they ran to embrace the woman, who hugged and kissed them in turn despite her exhaustion.

The boy managed to ask first. “What’s his name, Mama?”

The girl echoed his question. “Yes, Mama - what’s his name?”

After leaning back into the pillows of the bed that took up fully half of the royal bedchamber, the woman looked to her husband. “I don’t know, Alistair - what do you think we should name him?”


End file.
